Category: Cybersecurity Trends Blog

Tips for a Successful Adoption of SD-WAN in 2017

In 2017, SD-WAN adoption is skyrocketing as organizations seek to improve both hosted and cloud application performance, while keeping networking costs in check.

SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) has long promised many benefits to organizations with complex network setups. While many organizations with legacy MPLS systems have already begun analyzing and implementing an array of SD-WAN solutions, many are left debating the benefits of an SD-WAN architecture versus an MPLS architecture.

Why should you choose SD-WAN?

According to analysts at Gartner, businesses are adopting SD-WANs to improve performance for all applications, including cloud apps like Office 365, Salesforce, and Dropbox. Additionally, SD-WAN allows organizations to better manage connectivity capital and operating expenditures. SD-WANs offer a simplified, yet financially lucrative WAN solution for supporting multiple branch offices, often seen in the retail, financial, and healthcare industries.

Beyond cost savings, SD-WANs really shine in situations where network performance is continually lagging. During these times, SD-WANs utilize software to control and dynamically route faster paths for the software connections. This allows you to implement changes in a matter of minutes, instead of months.

Combine this with the reality of having infrastructure with both a separate control and data plane, and it becomes very clear why many companies have already converted their costly MPLS networks.

In our eyes, given the reality that 45% of the TCO (total cost of ownership) of running a WAN is related to people, SD-WAN can finally deliver the big three things IT decision makers are looking for.

Saving money.

Saving time and talent.

Improving performance.

So where do you fall on the spectrum? Are you looking at SD-WAN solutions or is the process and the architecture still too complicated?